What’s Your Favorite Color (Scheme)?

Let’s begin with the simplest of configurations. We’ll
customize our environment to a color scheme we
prefer. This is simple, and uses one of the basics of Vim scripts, the
simple Vim command.

Vim ships with 17 customized color schemes. You can choose and
activate a color scheme by putting the colorscheme
command in your .vimrc or
.gvimrc file. A favorite “understated” color scheme of one author is
the desert scheme:

colorscheme desert

Put a colorscheme like that
in your configuration file, and now every time you edit with Vim you
will see your favorite colors.

So our first script is trivial. What if your tastes for your
color scheme are more complex? What if you like more than one color
scheme? What if the time of day correlates to your preferences? Vim
scripts easily let you do this.

Note

Choosing an alternate color scheme depending on the time of
day may seem trite, but maybe not as much as you may think. Even
Google changes the colors and tone of your
iGoogle home page throughout the day.

Conditional Execution

One of the authors likes to divide the day into four partitions, each
with its own dedicated color scheme:

darkblue

Midnight to 6 a.m.

morning

6 a.m. to noon

shine

Noon to 6 p.m.

evening

6 p.m. to midnight

We’ll build a nested if...then...else... block
of code for this purpose. There are a couple of
different syntaxes you can use for this block. One is more
traditional, with an explicitly laid out syntax:

ifcond exprline of vim codeanother line of ...

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